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Maga Magazine Interview with Jin

What does Jin (Shizen no Teki-P), the creator of Kagerou Project – which has reached its tenth anniversary –, have to tell us about the surprising secret story of its birth and about his VOCALOID compositions!?

Kagerou Project is a music series that began in 2011 with “Jinzou Enemy” and depicts the outlandish fate of boys and girls. It boasts enough popularity to have been turned into both a novel and a manga under the title of “Kagerou Daze”, ultimately receiving an anime adaptation as “Mekakucity Actors”.

We have interviewed Mr. Jin (Shizen no Teki-P), who birthed this big-hit series and worked as its writer, original creator and composer in the boundaries between multi-media adaptations and who has been currently providing music in all sorts of fields.

Translated on commission || Raw version here

■ His cue to start making VOCALOID music.

——We will be going straight to the point – Jin-san, what was your cue to start making VOCALOID music?

Jin: My father was a teacher, so I used to live life moving from one place to another in Hokkaido. From that point, I was influenced by many types of music, especially when I was in junior high and wasn’t attending school, almost like a dropout. When I listened to music back then, I was like, “Aah, so there are people in this world who think in the same way as I do”, which really saved me.

It was from there that I began aspiring to make music someday.

Later on, during my high school days, I was playing in a band in a sort of copy-pasta way. After that, I enrolled into a vocational school in Sapporo and back then, too, I was in a band. However, you need to earn basic expenses in order to live off music, so most of us aimed to get normal jobs, which resulted in disbandment.

Just as I thought that I also had to find employment, the older brother of a classmate whom I was close to asked me, “Jin-kun, so your band is gonna end?” When I told him that I wanted to be a composer but it was too hard, he said, “Why don’t you make songs using VOCALOID?”

I believe he recommended it to be because he himself was making songs with VOCALOID, and that was the cue for me to get to know about VOCALOID for the first time.

Back then, I was a naughty band man and didn’t have a computer, so I didn’t know about Nico Nico Douga. Therefore, I knew nothing about what internet culture even was, let alone about Hachi-san, who now works under the name “Yonezu Kenshi”, or DECO*27, who is extremely active.

I thought VOCALOID seemed interesting, so from that point on, I learned how to use a computer and began using VOCALOID just like that, without knowing anything about it.

——So that person’s recommendation was the trigger?

Jin: Feels like it was literally the sentence that changed my life.

He was, in fact, also active as a VOCALO-P. I didn’t know anything about VOCALOID or song making at the time, so he taught me a lot.

I didn’t have a fixed concept myself, so not knowing anything might have actually worked on my favor. It was weird to me that I was supposed to upload my stuff not to a music site but to a video site even though it was music, but in contrast, I was excited when I started it out.

■ What made him think about creating the “Kagerou Project” series.

——Now then, we would like you to tell us why you decided to make a series like “Kagerou Project”.

Jin: I’ll have to rewind a little bit, but when I was in junior high, I didn’t attend school for a while. I couldn’t bring myself to go to school at all, just read books and played video games at home, so looking back on it now, I think my parents must have been pretty uneasy at the time.

Back then, I was into Hoshi Shinichi-san’s “Short Short” and Otokazu-san’s novels, which had a horror taste to them. I was also reading the works of Morimi Tomihiko-san and Isaka Koutarou-san. I was by no means a bookworm, but I didn’t have any money, so I’d borrow lots of books from libraries and read them.

The band that I got into just as I was about to become a respectable member of society was also making some pretty trendy music. We also played music with nothing but our instruments – the so-called “instrumental sound”, with no lyrics. I then began favoring and listening to foreign and complex music, like, “I’m so awesome for understanding this stuff.”

But when our band did live concerts, we only had two or so guests.

——So these books and overseas music triggered your decision to create something that had a story to it?

Jin: That’s right.

When I was about to start using VOCALOID for real, many things crossed my mind out of the blue. One of them was something like a plot. So I felt like challenging myself to making it someday.

However, when I was in a band, there were other members. Wouldn’t it be embarrassing if I just told them, “I actually have a made-up story of my own~”? I think that if I talked about it to the people who were in the band with me at the time, they would have paid no attention to it. But since I was going through the trouble of using VOCALOID, I thought, there was nothing to fear. I then decided to give the story a try.

The rock band The Who, which used to create stories through music, would make a whole story with one album between the 60’s and the 70’s. The guitarist, Pete Townshend, used to write the stories himself and performed rock opera and theater.

That’s what “KagePro” is now. In any case, I copied this thing of making a story with an album, but it was something that I had wanted to do since long ago. But I thought that if I did my best, I could make it work with VOCALOID despite Japan being the way it was back then, thus I began producing my music series.

■ How he created the characters from the songs and novels of “Kagerou Project” || The points he is conscious of

——Regarding “Kagerou Project”, how do you create the charismatic characters that appear in the songs? We would like you to tell us what points you are conscious of.

Jin: Let’s see. To me, “characters” play roles that appear in various places. The first time I think about them is when I’m composing the songs. They’re the people who turn into the subjects of the story when I’m writing the lyrics. The point is how to create “someone who could become a protagonist that I can fit into this one song”.

I was still pretty much an amateur regarding production back then, but as a way of creation, I decided to come up with a theme first and foremost. For example, suppose you have a situation where someone comes to pick you up when you’re secluded in your home. How one’s emotions work at such moments – I wanted to express things like that.

So I decided to firstly plan out this character. If something like a nightmare on a hot summer day happened to him and he were unable to get away from it, I think it would be quite terrifying. If it were a loop, it would be even more disturbing. When I wondered, “Then what would the protagonist be like as a person when something of this sort happened to him?”, the first thing I thought was, “He wouldn’t be an adult”. I figured that a child, who has a less developed mind, would be far more scared, and so I tried to come in contact with what would become the core of this character.

——I see. So you would imagine characters that matched the scenarios from these themes and situations. Then, regarding the making of the novels and manga, is there any difference between that and composing the songs?

Jin: I received a proposal by KADOKAWA-san to publish novels and manga. At first, I was completely convinced that someone was going to adapt my songs into novels. This was during the time when I myself was struggling, as I was unable to aim for a career as musician, and of course, there are many people in the literary industry desperately attempting to become novelists, to no avail. Therefore, I thought this wasn’t the kind of thing that would just work itself out if someone like me suddenly started writing. But as the talk went on with the editor, I was told to “try and write one volume”, and although I believed it would be pretty difficult, I thought, “It’s fine if it fails”, so in that moment, my grandiose ideas and the desire to put them into shape began to overflow, which made me say, “I’ll do it.”

That was right by the time when I had just turned 20, and I had a job. During my breaks from work, I would be digging deep into the characters. After all, the novel needed more detailed settings, such as speech habits and personality. It was like, “This character is similar to one from a book that I read in the past, so I guess I’ll add these traits to them” or, “That character has a bright personality, but on top of that, I want to make them a bit prone to acting rashly”. I created my characters from the images of how I wanted them to be plus already-existing works.

——So, indeed, you created charismatic characters by broadening their image from songs to novel.

Jin: That’s right. When I was making the songs, I had a core born from their themes, which I dug up and thought about even more later on, in order to write the novels. I feel that the characters’ personalities were elaborated concretely.

——You were making the songs, novels and manga, so were you too busy back then?

Jin: Yes. I mentioned earlier that I had a job, and I actually continued doing it until the time when my first major album, first volume of the novel and first chapter of the manga were being released. Back then, I was only able to sleep two to three hours a day while making songs, writing the novels, creating materials and settings for the manga and having meetings to discuss about them, then going to work and coming back home to repeat the song making and novel writing. It was terrible (laughs), so I guess I put in quite a lot of effort.

——Sounds extremely demanding just from listening to that.

Jin: I have a lot of attachment towards the characters because I created them during those times.

——I see.

■ The points that he was conscious of when producing his content

——“Kagerou Project” progressed with various contents through the songs, novels and manga, so is there anything you were conscious of when producing them?

Jin: From the top of my head, broadly speaking, there were two things. The moment when I realized that “Kagerou Daze” could be turned into a book and serialized as a manga. I thought this was an once-in-a-lifetime chance.

I had the opportunity to talk to all sorts of people back then, and amongst them, there was someone who told me, “Chances most certainly come to people several times. I think our lives are decided by how much we devote ourselves to those chances”, and I thought, “Ah, that’s true”. In that moment, I thought I didn’t want to have any regrets once I debuted, no matter what. I reminisced to things like wanting to quit because I was tired and wanted to sleep, or to the fact that my life until then consisted of doing what others told me to do, be it about school or work. I should do this for myself, I thought, deciding to suffer for my very own sake, so this was a powerful lesson for me.

Even now, I’m still glad that I got into this mentality. So I didn’t want to run away no matter how difficult things were, because even when my health deteriorated and I wanted to sleep, I had this feeling that, having come up to this point, what I wanted wasn’t for someone to praise me, but to have no regrets.

After realizing that I didn’t want to have the sensation of not knowing what I was doing, which I felt during my student years, I decided to stick to this mindset until I took down my banner of activities as “Jin”.

——I have felt this way before too. That is the desire to cherish something, right? By the way, you said that, broadly speaking, there were two things, so what would the other one be?

Jin: The other one is simply that having everyone say, “I’m anxiously waiting for it” is important to me, so I make sure not to lie to them. This is very difficult to talk about, but I don’t want to put a pretty coating on things that I inwardly deem as bad and make it as though they are good in order to sell them to children.

To be honest, if I were to do that, probably no one would find out. Children lack many sorts of criteria, so they think that the things they see for the first time are bound to be good. These kids are the viewers, so we are in a position where we can cheat, which is exactly why we shouldn’t cheat no matter what – this is something that our whole staff, myself included, places importance on. We always make sure to create a story that isn’t like, “It’s children; they won’t notice anything, so we don’t have to do any effort – just doing it at random is fine”.

Therefore, if they happen to deem it as a source of encouragement for living, it’s thanks to the adults properly handling it in earnest like a bunch of idiots, and we can proudly claim that there were no lies involved. That’s what matters to us.

——So what matters to you regarding the production is doing your best now in order not to have any regrets, as well as not telling any lies, is that correct?

Jin: Yes.

——I see. I was able to feel for myself once again that we still like this series so much even now precisely because the songs were made with such honest, utmost effort.

Jin: Thank you very much.

■ The process of releasing music || The points he is conscious of

——I understand you provide music for other animes as well, such as “Mahouka Koukou no Yuutousei”, most recently. I would like to ask what the process is like and what you are conscious of in those cases, but first, how is the process of receiving the commission?

Jin: If it’s for anime theme songs, for example, I firstly get contacted by someone from my agency. We receive requests such as, “We would like to write a song; could you please ask an artist to provide us a composition?” and, “The song they will provide is one that we are thinking of making into the theme song of our next anime”. From there, we decide on the direction it will take together with my agency’s staff, the directors that provide support for matters surrounding the music, and other such people.

——Then, in regards to providing compositions, what are you conscious of when making them?

Jin: I basically believe that music is something that delivers a message and that there should be some sort of goal to it. So when I have to choose between making it either an artist-appropriate music piece or an anime-appropriate theme song, it’s pretty distressing for me.

Therefore, I decide to make both a reality every single time. I take on the artist’s “wish to sing this kind of song” and “the feelings they want to convey to the fans”. All that’s left to do is to blend things such as “what were my intentions towards writing this work?” and “how does the artist want to sing it?” into a mess, and as you’d expect, the parts connect with each other. I want to take this from the anime and that from the artist and make it into one and the same. This discovery can be explained with logic, and there are also parts of it that I can grasp intuitively.

——I think that is a wonderful way of thinking and perspective, which can be taken into consideration from either standpoint exactly because you have experience with both song composition and novel production. You create content thinking a lot about the message it will convey, don’t you?

Jin: Well, the rest is just letting the ideas run wild. Like, “I wonder what kind of theme song would get me fired-up”. I turn myself into a fan of those works or artists for a moment and think. It feels a bit different from the music I make for myself. There’s a different kind of fun and heat in that, and I think my work is about incorporating them into it.

■ The appeal of VOCALOID for Jin-san

——Jin-san, we would like you to tell us about what the appeal of VOCALOID is to you.

Jin: There might be a lot to it, but I thought being able to make a song that wasn’t yours but someone else’s without asking anybody, instead composing it as if it were your own, was revolutionary.

For starters, half of the people in this world can’t use a feminine voice. I think there are walls that are difficult to overcome due to people’s body structure. I was drawn in by the fact that a technology was invented in order to get rid of this. I was obsessed with that first-thing.

Also, if I were to give a decisive argument, I think there’s worth in the fact that it has no emotion. When you’re reading a novel, for example, all that is there is paper and ink. But I think you can definitely process the passionate things hidden in the depths of it. When it comes to songs, unlike novels, you can process things such as the emotions of the singer.

On the other hand, I wanted to create a story with music, so there was a moment where I didn’t want people to listen to it as something emotional. I guess we can say that it is, in a sense, an audio novel. I had the desire to make it something like a sung tale or a story with a melody.

I think I was able to give it a try back then exactly because VOCALOID was like a middle ground between synthesizers and human beings. If VOCALOID didn’t exist, even if I wanted to make a musical story or a series, I might have been like, “On second thought, I give up” along the way. I think this facet of VOCALOID is appealing as an extremely good trait.

It’s no longer a matter of surpassing it or not. There are things that even the human voice can’t reach, no matter what.

——Thank you very much.

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